It is closely related to Tok Pisin of Papua New Guinea and Bislama of Vanuatu; the three varieties are sometimes considered to be dialects of a single Melanesian Pidgin language.
[3][4] Between 1863 and 1906, blackbirding was used for the sugar cane plantation labour trade in Queensland, Samoa, Fiji and New Caledonia.
Old people today still remember the stories that were told by the old former Queensland hands many years after their return [6] [7] Plantation languages continued into the 20th century even though the process of blackbirding had ceased.
With Pax Britannica and the advent of the local plantation system in the Solomon Islands, the use of Pijin was reactivated and the language started to spread in the country.
Throughout the 20th century Pijin kept spreading: historical events such as Maasina Rule and WWII, and social changes such as urbanisation, played a central role in the transformation of the language.
Despite being the lingua franca of Solomon Islands, Pijin remains a spoken language with little to no effort made thus far on the part of the national government toward standardising its orthography and grammar.
This being the case, Pijin remains a very flexible language where the main focus is on message delivery irrespective of the niceties of formal sentence construction.
[12]) Several consonant phonemes show variation,[13] in part depending on the speaker's personal linguistic background – i.e. the phonological profile of the vernacular language(s) they speak at home.
Several cases of variation are simply due to the regular devoicing of voiced consonants at the end of syllables (a common alternation in the world's languages) Other cases reflect the widespread habit, among Oceanic languages, to associate voicing with prenasalization: Aftanun olketa!
Tanggio tumas = 'Thank you very much' Pijin, like other languages to which it is related, involves a distinction between singular, dual, trial and plural pronouns.
The inclusive and exclusive features are only realised in the first person dual, trial, and plural pronoun forms.
Therefore, speakers of the language add vowels in between consonants and word-finally to adapt the English forms to Pijin grammar.